In a few days, if all goes according to present schedules, Donald John Trump will be sworn in as the United States of America’s 45th President. After more than 18 months of the ugliest election in modern American history (way back when there were some equally nasty), the national mood is as soured as I have ever known it, right up there with the crackling late 1960’s to early Vietnam war/Watergate 1970’s. I can’t say I think the mood would be much different had Hilary Clinton’s political technocrats not blinded themselves and lost from their own stupidity. It reminds of those brilliant Harvard souls of the 60’s, the Brightest and the Best, who mired the country in Vietnam. Just as in his utterly vulgar manner does Mr Trump, who is convinced he is the brightest and the best, and the proof is how he blew away the pathetic hollow men of the Republican Party, and then out-smarted smarty-pants Clinton, perhaps with a little help of yet-to-be-fully-confirmed skullduggery from afar, and much closer – as in the FBI.

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In the past month, Trump has assembled his troops – appointing billionaire oligarch’s to fill out his cabinet, ex-soldiers to doubtless enforce the rulings soon to come – and surrounding himself with the subservient souls of his family, a shrill Harvard-trained neo-nazi as his chief of Staff, in company with GOP supplicant Reince Priebus providing a facade of respectability in the front office. Tweeting away in his past manner, Trump takes credit for re-directing corporate America to made-in-USA policies, all while aiming zingers at anyone who happens to offend him. And he is easily offended. The tweets largely re-direct press and public attention from the uglier steps being taken behind the smoke-screen of allegedly outrageous 140 character comments. Donald Trump is a show-biz TV star, con-man extraordinaire. Watch as he distracts with one hand, and acts with the other.

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Apparently false internet slice of “fake” news.

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Taken at face-value, thus far Mr. Trump’s behavior is by-the-book fascism. Win an election “legally.” Develop a cult-of-personality. Use whatever “legal” powers one has obtained to change the norms and rules. (See this.) And, as is Trump’s instinct, bully. The next steps are to simply break the laws and render them meaningless, sending out armed parties to enforce the new norms. Such things can only happen in cultures which are already hollowed out, the values of which have distilled to mere rhetoric. Like the old Soviet Union, in which the embalmed living of the CCCP stumbled forward, their chests heavy with ribbons and hammer and sickle pins, red flags behind them, and when pressed by reality, crumbled in a near instant.

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Such is America today, which now for some decades has lived a similar farce, with stiff well-coiffed politicians, spouting empty slogans, and ditto-head wearing their damn American flag pins, flanked with a backdrop of the good old Red White and Blue in Warholian repeats. Meanwhile, just like the old USSR, wealth is funneled up to a select few, and infrastructure is left to ruin, the wide social body is dismissed to fend for itself, and new platitudes and drugs are brought out to mollify the discontented mob. Following dead-man Brezhnev, came Gorbachev’s glasnost, and then the collapse of the Empire for a time run by a drunk Yeltzin, to be followed by bare-chested strong-man Putin, who looks to be there until he croaks.

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Obama was our feeble attempt at glasnost, a Harvard-trained company man trying to soften the hard edges of the system, and failing. Descending in his golden escalator, Mr Trump stepped into the political vacuum of the GOP, and the self-satisfied cloud of the Democratic party’s self-delusions, and while a teetotaler himself, doubtless will play a variant of the role of Yeltzin. The real strong-man in this scenario will enter in the chaos of Trump’s regime. Trump is, as long ago predicted by the Sage of Baltimore, the quintessence of our culture, a living character right out of the Simpsons, hair-do and all.

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The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

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America is corrupt – morally, socially. This reality is reflected throughout the culture: in politics – high and low. In our skewed economics. In the halls of academy, high and low, where grade inflation is a norm and buying a high-end education is an accepted reality (as in the cases of Donald Trump and George Bush).

We have been corrupted a long time, and we have accepted that corruption as a given. Look at our mass media and “entertainment.” Look at our bread and circuses “sports” as billion-dollar businesses, and the absurdist skew of extreme wealth for the .01% and the considerable wealth for the top 20% and the crumbs left for the rest, all accepted for decades as part of our capitalist ethos, and hence proper and OK. Look at the obscene hypocrisy of our loud-mouthed “Christian” fundamentalists (e.g. Pence, Cruz et al) and how they supported Donald Trump, who is a clear liar, serial trophy-wife multiple divorcee, a sexist pussy-grabber and all out hedonist, a Midas who coats all he touches with gold, and is empty of any heart. Look at the “family values” espousing Republicans who all fell supine before Trump once he won. Look at the Democrats who bowed before the Golden Calf of corporate money, and embodied it in themselves, abandoning their interest in the diminishing working-class. Across the board, our society is deeply corrupted, and even more so in that large swathes of the country – nice good liberals included – are unable to admit it. Trump is the result, and we fully deserve it.

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Rubio: “Are you aware that people who oppose Vladimir Putin wind up dead all over the world, poisoned, shot in the back of the head…?” Tillerson: “People who speak up for freedom in regimes that are repressive…these things happen to them.”

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It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.